collective action

Highlights collection from Policy & Politics: free to access from 1st May – 31st August 2026 on Environmental policy through theory: collaboration, narratives, evidence and design 

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by Allegra Fullerton (Digital Associate Editor) and Sarah Brown (Senior Journals Manager)

The articles featured here demonstrate how collaborative governance, policy narratives, evidence use and policy design shape environmental policy, revealing how coordination, meaning, knowledge and calibration interact to influence policy targets, implementation pathways and outcomes. What links the four contributions is not only their theoretical pluralism but also a shared methodological ambition: each pushes an established policy process framework in new empirical directions, drawing on approaches ranging from evolutionary game modelling to natural language processing and multilevel Bayesian regression.  

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Collaborative climate governance: linking consensus-building and collective action 

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By Cheng Zhou and Clare Richardson-Barlow 

This article develops a new framework for understanding how collaboration between governments and enterprises evolves in climate governance. The analysis connects two processes that are often studied separately: the development of consensus among stakeholders and the emergence of collective action to address climate change.  

Collaborative governance has become an increasingly important approach to addressing complex policy challenges such as climate change. These issues typically require cooperation between multiple actors, including governments, firms, and other organisations. While existing frameworks explain many institutional features of collaboration, they often pay less attention to how collaborative behaviour develops between participants over time. 

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Paul Cairney reviews Graham Room’s book on Agile Actors on Complex Terrains (2016)

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Paul CairneyPaul Cairney

Paul Cairney reviews Graham Room’s Agile Actors on Complex Terrains (Routledge, 2016). Paul is guest editor of our 2018 special issue: Practical Lessons on Policy Theories

Some background context on complexity theory

If used wisely, complexity theory has the potential to make a great contribution to the study of politics and policymaking. It offers a way to think about, and visualise, the interaction between many actors, following many rules, to produce outcomes that we can relate to the properties of complex systems.  Continue reading →

Strategies for collaborating in fragmented governments

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Swann_KimWilliam L. Swann and Seo Young Kim

Whether protecting a watershed, recovering from a natural disaster, or facilitating international trade, governments often need to collaborate to achieve policy goals. But resolving complex problems across fragmented jurisdictional landscapes involves overcoming significant collective action barriers.

Governments, like individuals, have an incentive to free ride on collective efforts and obtain benefits without contributing to the costs of public goods. For example, all governments in a region benefit from air pollution mitigation, but each government has an incentive to enjoy cleaner air without making the sacrifices to produce it. Continue reading →